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Theater / Operational Missiles

After the US withdrawal from the INF treaty to eliminate missiles with a range of 500-5,000 km, Russia intends to move its ship- and plane-based missiles to land. On 02 February 2019, President Vladimir Putin announced a mirror response to the US withdrawal from the INF arms control treaty. As a result, the coming decade will see the appearance in Russia of ground installations able to hit enemy bases at distances from 500 to 5,500 km.

First of all, the presidential order involves moving Kalibr-type missiles from sea to land. Not only are they to be integrated into ground-based weapons systems, but upgraded with hypersonic technologies capable of circumventing all existing enemy missile defense systems. The Russian military is considering the Iskander-M missile system as the carrier of the land-based Kalibr. The former is currently deployed in Kaliningrad on the border of Eastern Europe to counter the US missile shield in Poland. These systems’ arsenal is now set to be expanded with new precision weapons capable of hitting targets as far away as the Mediterranean.

Another item in the new “ground upgrade” list is the latest hypersonic Kinzhal (Dagger) missile for MiG-31 interceptor aircraft. Military sources state that this is currently the only air missile able to fly at Mach 8. In the words of Colonel-General Sergei Surovikin, commander-in-chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces, the air-launched version of the Kinzhal can strike targets at a distance of more than 2,000 km without entering the enemy’s air defense zone.